As part of the « Imagining Crises » course offered to 3A students at Mines Paris - PSL, participants explore potential crises in a world where large organizations have vanished, replaced by autonomous yet interdependent local structures. They build fictional yet plausible scenarios, drawing on scientific, technical, economic, and social knowledge, as well as expert exchanges.
Each scenario starts with a given situation, territory, or system to explore the trigger, evolution, and cascading consequences of a crisis. For instance, one scenario depicts the autonomous community of Charmois, rebuilt after the collapse of the globalized world on local agriculture and collective decision-making. Facing several poor harvests, it must confront a moral and political crisis: who can stay, and who must be exiled to survive the winter?
Students imagine solutions such as lotteries, general rationing, or sacrificing the youngest, revealing different conceptions of justice and the value of human lives. The scenario illustrates how a society founded on solidarity can disintegrate under the pressure of scarcity, transforming a food crisis into a social and political one.
Through various fictional documents (press articles, letters, leaflets), the creation confronts the inhabitants' moral justifications and questions the limits of democracy and solidarity in the face of survival, the trade-offs between individual and collective interests, and how crises reveal and transform a society's values.
